Prisoner

Ryan Adams’ new album is being positioned as one of his classic breakup records. In terms of its sound, at least, it's a winner.

Ryan Adams gravely misread the pop culture climate of 2015 and his fan letter to Taylor Swift was incinerated on arrival by the hot takes. But at least 1989 was a reminder of a time when he was generating reactions that ran deeper than a respect for craft. For most of the past decade, Adams has made albums of almost oppressive competence: whether the songs from Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams took five minutes or five years of soul-searching to create, they all come out sounding equally effortless. Purely in terms of its content, Adams’ new album, Prisoner, is more of the same, and how that sits will depend on whether you’ve heard the singles or read the press clippings. It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.

Still, as latter-day Ryan Adams albums go, there’s more buzz than usual around Prisoner, and rightfully so. The neural blasts of guitar misfiring all over “Do You Still Love Me?” and “Doomsday”’s pink-mist shimmer outline a convergence point where the heartland comfort food of Ryan Adams, the puckish punk whims of 1984, and the arena-rock aspirations of 1989 meet. Purely as sound, Prisoner unquestionably succeeds; though Reagan-era AOR is basically a primary color of modern pop at this point, Adams’ vocals and lyrical tics are so well established that any genre bends to his will. If the title track and “Anything I Say to You Now” aren’t career highlights, they’re at least ambitions fully realized—quintessential 2010s Ryan Adams, conveying a mis-remembered ’80s where Tunnel of Love and The Queen Is Dead are close neighbors on record shelves and equally revered documents of idealized longing.

Previews of Prisoner have not been shy about stating the obvious: this is Adams’ first album since separating from actress Mandy Moore, which he described as a “humiliating and just a fucking horrible thing to go through.” The context of the breakup is so central to how the album is being heard, news of the event might as well be slapped on a sticker on the cover. But though it lacks the intoxicating, top-of-the-world cockiness that powered Gold through its street-walkin’ low points, Prisoner is Adams’ most complete work since then—he’s not stuck in a single mode. The Deadheaded “To Be Without You” rambles on like Cold Roses, so that the line “nothing really matters anymore” registers like a cashed-bowl shrug, while, the chipper strum of “Haunted House” shows the dark side of the record’s offhandedness, coming very close to Hootie’s “Only Wanna Be With You.”

Adams is the first to joke about his stock phrases, and his self-awareness renders his most objectively miserable work tolerable—any mention of “rain” or "trains" in one of his songs, for example, has a meta quality, his version of a DJ tag. But hearing “Thorn in my side/Pain I can’t hide,” “Oh, my soul is/Black as coal,” or “Feel like I’m headed for a breakdown/Feel like I’m racing and I can’t come down” tossed around carelessly within the same song is enough to question where Adams’ appreciation of soft-rock schlock ends and appropriation begins. Prisoner is filled with lyrics like these, lines that feel like placeholders for universal truths or even personalized expressions of pain that rarely emerge. While it’s impossible to evaluate the album’s sincerity, inspiration is a more tangible quality, and Adams comes off like an A student uncharacteristically frozen by an essay prompt, filling the margins with the hopes that his reputation can get him out of this jam, this one time.

A generous reading of Prisoner can play it off as a commentary on the futility of “breakup albums” at a certain point in your life—that the hurt can feel as debilitating and devastating as it did in similar situations years ago, but the need to dramatize it just isn’t there anymore. In fact, as tell-alls have become the norm for public breakups between artists in recent years—ranging from Dirty Projectors to Dirty Sprite 2, from Tourist in This Town to, ahem, Taylor Swift—it can be a relief to hear something that doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy for the party not present. But the emotional equanimity of Prisoner always feels unintentional, or worse, a byproduct of his unerring craft. While Prisoner clearly aspires to join Love Is Hell or 29 or Heartbreaker as another platonic ideal for a “sad Ryan Adams album,” it can't help but be “another Ryan Adams album.”